You’ve heard the story: Motherhood and work are at odds, and women who pursue both have to make endless trade-offs and compromises. And yet, lots of women go for it, with great results for themselves, their families, and their careers. In fact, research suggests that parenting can enrich our careers, and vice versa.

Professors Danna Greenberg and Jamie Ladge talk about the benefits of being a working mom. They share advice around setting expectations, finding child care, asking for help, and advocating for ourselves as kids get older. Then, our fellow HBR editor Erica Truxler checks in with a listener about returning to work after parental leave.

Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.

TRANSCRIPT

DANNA GREENBERG: It’s hard to imagine the positive pieces of this story when so much of it is about going to work with clothes that are messed up, your hair undone, worrying about how your boss is going to see you, worrying about how the stay-at-home moms on the playground are going to see you. And that rhetoric makes you feel like you’ve got to focus on just self-preservation and management.

AMY GALLO: And I’m Amy Gallo. This episode, we’re looking at an aspect of working motherhood that in my opinion doesn’t get nearly enough attention: the positive pieces. There are lots of reasons women should feel hopeful about having a career and children.

NICOLE TORRES: We’re talking to two professors who — between their academic research and experience raising three kids each — are experts on working motherhood: Danna Greenberg, of Babson College, and Jamie Ladge, of Northeastern University.

JAMIE LADGE: A lot of the women that have been part of our research over the years are older first-time mothers, so much of their identity is wrapped up in their professional life, and pregnancy and impending motherhood throws a real wrench in that identity.

AMY BERNSTEIN: They’ve organized their insights and advice into a book; it’s called Maternal Optimism.

[MUSIC ENDS]

AMY BERNSTEIN: Jamie, let me start with you. What were you seeing in the coverage of working motherhood that made you want to do this work?

JAMIE LADGE: Well, as you all know, there is no shortage of books about working mothers, and we knew that there were quite a few. And we were a little bit hesitant to get into it. But we were frustrated by a lot of the rhetoric — having it all — and a lot of the negativity surrounding the issues that a lot of working mothers face. And certainly, that exists, all the biases and stigma associated with being a working mother. But we really wanted to first and foremost try to come at this with a very positive spin, not that it’s all positive, but there are experiences that women face throughout the course of their motherhood transitions and working mother transitions that work out well. And we wanted to be able to share those stories through the stories that we had seen and the research that we’ve done over many years.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

JAMIE LADGE: The other thing we were sort of tired of was kind of this one-size-fits-all approach. We know that a lot of women share common ground with their experiences around being a working mother, but we also think that no two mothers and working mother stories are alike, and we wanted to make sure that we shared a wide variety of different experiences in the book.

DANNA GREENBERG: Part of that of no two mothers stories being alike is the idea that there is not a start and end to being a working mother. So many of the books out there talk about this idea as if, you’ve returned to work. You made it. You are a working mother. And that’s just the first of so many transitions women experience throughout their careers as working mothers. And we felt like it was really important to help women start to understand: this is, this is a long distance run. It’s not short term. It’s not just about return to work. And there are constant iterations going on. And we thought giving them some perspective on that could be really helpful.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So in your book, you talk about how working motherhood really starts well before you have a baby in your arms. What do you mean by that?

DANNA GREENBERG: So, one of the things that we find is how frequently young women, long before they even have a partner, are starting to ask questions about combining work and motherhood. In ways that I don’t think we did in our generation. And one of the things that we worry a lot about and we see is that women are making choices early on that are about, will this be a career that I can eventually combine work and motherhood? And so I’ll give you a perfect example. My daughter is a chemistry and women’s health major. She’s premed. And she recently had a family member say to her, why don’t you think about becoming a physician’s assistant or a nurse practitioner, because it’s going to be much easier down the road to combine work and family. Now, my daughter is really career driven. She’s thinking about surgery and specialties. She is not, by the way, a nurturing primary caregiver. [LAUGHTER] So, nurse practitioner is not here thing. But women start to do that as young women, even in college and in those early years. And one of the things that we see, and we really advise women, is that this is a really important time to build your career, to figure out what you want to do and to use the time and space you have to build up your power, your credibility, your skill sets, your knowledge so that if and when you have a family, you have the resources to ask for what you need. And as I go back to my daughter’s story, as a physician who perhaps some day is in a specialty, there are lots more ways to create a flexible schedule if that’s what she wants, or to structure or to have the financial resources to have the childcare she needs than would be the case if she were a nurse practitioner. But this is advice many young women are still getting today.

NICOLE TORRES: So Jamie, your research on working motherhood started with this question: Is there ever a good time to have a baby, in terms of your career? And you’ve studied the effects that the timing of childbirth can have on a woman’s career. What have you found?

JAMIE LADGE: So one of the things I wanted to do, because there had been tons of research done, particularly in sociology, that looked at the effects of timing childbirth on women’s wages, and also on promotions. And so we knew that was a problem for women, that it’s much better to wait to have your first child, because during those early years in your 20s, you know, you’re building up your educational attainment. You’re making connections and building up your network, and all the human capital variables are just building up for you. And so that made sense for wages and for promotions. But I actually wanted to find out, well, are women happier? Are they more satisfied with their careers? So I wanted to take a more subjective approach. And so we looked at that, and I mean, sadly I can’t say that there’s a magic age for when the best time is to have a baby. I would have loved to have been the one that discovered what that age was. But I have to be like, you know, typical consultant mode and say, it depends, because it really, it does depend. But one of the things we did find, that the women that had their children earlier in their careers were actually more satisfied later on. This is taking more of a life course approach. And we surmise that that’s because they had more time that had elapsed since when they started their families. So they were able to build their career back up. As opposed to a lot of the women that we’ve interviewed over the years who were much older first-time moms, well into their 30s, some in their 40s, and they had kind of the sense of, well, I paid my dues at work. And now that I’m having my child, I can kind of take a step back, or I can mold my career however I want to mold. So, not a perfect age, but if you want to be happy with your career, it really doesn’t matter, but it does seem that you can get going a little bit earlier.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I want to talk about the decision to have more than one child. We know that, you know, there are penalties to having more than one kid. You know, there’s your wages will suffer and so forth. How do women who would like to have more than one kid stay positive? What should they be thinking about?

DANNA GREENBERG: So, one of the things we don’t think about is how the family structure changes when you have multiple children. One of the things that we know from our own research is that when women have their first child, one of the biggest challenges is enabling their partner to be a real partner, particularly if they’re in a situation where they’ve got a maternity leave, and their partner doesn’t. They start taking on a lot of the childcare responsibilities, and they don’t figure out a way to really share parental responsibilities with their partner, and they don’t make them a real partner. When you have a second child, that goes out the window, because all of a sudden, there’s a lot more childcare responsibilities to have, and they have to be shared. So women have to let up. They have to enable their partner to be a real partner to them, to share some aspects of that childcare responsibility, which enables them to be more confident and more engaged at work. Because they know that there is another person who is equally capable at home. So that’s one of the things that happens in the family that can be really beneficial for a working mother. The other thing that we talk about in our house is that having multiples of children, somebody’s always happy, and someone’s always unhappy. [LAUGHTER] We call it the Whack-a-Mole game. Remember that old game you had as a child? And you hit the mole, and they’d pop right up. But one of the things women often do, working mothers, is they add guilt to themselves when something’s not working with their child. Oh, it would be different if I were home full time, if I wasn’t working, if I were focused. When you have multiples, you get that go, because you start to realize, their challenges, they’re experiencing them as individual people. And you see one child having a good day and one child having a bad day, and it really has nothing to do with you. It has to do with them. So, those feelings of guilt that you’re causing this really change.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, the second and third and fourth and 12th child give you perspective.

DANNA GREENBERG: They give you a lot of perspective. You’ve also accumulated a whole level of knowledge. You get to the third one — for me, I had three sequentially. You get to the third, and there’s a whole knowledge about how to deal with this, how to ask for help. You start to get much more comfortable being transparent about your work life and your family life, because you’ve been doing it for a while. It’s not a question of, am I a working mother? I have to hide it. What are the people going to think of me? This is who I am. So I actually have a colleague, the CFO at Babson. She has five children. She most recently had the fifth child, and the baby came with her to many, many meetings, and we just passed the baby around. This is a woman whose children range from 19 to probably 2. And she is a rock star CFO. There is no question. And you know what? Her childcare broke down, and she needed the baby to be there, and the baby just got passed. But there wasn’t this sense of conflict or guilt, which she certainly would have experienced having a first child. Never bring a first child to a meeting. But a fifth child, forget it. [LAUGHTER] Bring the child, send me around the meeting, all is good.

AMY GALLO: So, what are the positive benefits of being a working mom?

DANNA GREENBERG: It’s funny you ask, because I just did a study looking at women and asking them very much that question. After you’ve returned to work, what do you experience as positive about that? Or, what has enabled you to be more mindful. And there a couple of different things that we’re seeing in the research as we’re starting to look at the data. The first of which is perspective. There is a sense of, you know what, how important is this? Where does it fit into my day? How much do I have to do all of this myself? Or is 80% good enough? And that can be helpful for women to do their job more effectively. One of the things we see changing in managers is a stopping of micromanagement, because they don’t have time to do that. One of the things that women often do is they want everything to be perfect. They want everyone who’s working for them have everything perfect, and when they return to work after having a child, they realize, you know what, that’s not what really needs to get done, and that’s not helpful for my team. The third thing, which is a really interesting one we’re starting to see, is something we’re seeing in relational capacity. Women talk about returning to work and having now be in this caretaker role, all of a sudden I’m better with my employees. I am more thoughtful. I’m more understanding. I don’t always like what they’re saying. I don’t always agree with what they’re saying. But I have a little bit more patience for dealing with people in a way that maybe I didn’t before becoming a parent. So, I suspect that these are things — this study we’re looking specifically at women, but I would suspect these are absolutely very similar things for working men when they become fathers and are engaged caregivers.

AMY GALLO: One of the themes I took away from your book is that working moms need to have realistic expectations. I would say lower their expectations, but I’m trying to be optimistic. What are some examples of how you can set realistic expectations? And maybe you could specifically talk about the crappy dinners example. I loved that example in your book.

DANNA GREENBERG: Crappy dinners example. So, the crappy dinner idea is a great idea that we’ve seen written about where —

JAMIE LADGE: Otherwise known as every night for me. [LAUGHTER]

DANNA GREENBERG: I like to cook. I find it relaxing. This was actually really empowering for me was the idea that you get together with another friend during the week. You bring your families together, and you serve whatever you can find in your house. No one’s allowed to clean up. No one’s allowed to buy anything. It’s not the Martha Stewart, Real Simple of the world. It’s just, let’s get together and share some friendship and help each other out during these difficult periods of time. And women need to let up. They need to let up at home, they need to let up at work so that they can embrace those more joyful moments, which sometimes are just about connecting and sharing stories of our day.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. I met a woman who, our kids were in preschool together. I said, oh, our families should get together for dinner. And she said, we just can’t handle that. But if you’d like to meet us for a grocery store picnic, you can. I was like, what is that? And she said, we go to the grocery store. We go grocery shopping. We let the kids get stuff from the hot food bar, and then we sit in the car and talk. And I was like, wow, I’m totally doing that. And it became like a weekly thing we started doing on our own, too, because it was, you got your errands done. The kids were super happy, because they got to eat crappy food from, you know, the grocery store. And there was no cleanup. You know, it was just, it was so easy.

JAMIE LADGE: I actually think the setting realistic expectations is an interesting proposition because there’s so many idealistic expectations. And I actually just wrote a paper with Laura Little at University of Georgia about this very topic, where the expectations very much become our reality. And we subscribe so much to what we think we should be doing or what other people think we should be doing in terms of being an ideal worker or an ideal parent, that we don’t even have time to figure that out for ourselves, or that influences what that turns into, or what that looks like for us. So, our identity is very much shaped by this whole idealistic expectation. So, I wish we could have realistic expectations, and I think that women need to really figure out what that means for them as opposed to what it is at a more societal level.

AMY GALLO: It strikes me that being a working mom is really just an extreme exercise in prioritization. And you just have to decide what you’re going to prioritize at the moment, because your life is full, as is everyone’s, whether you’re a mom or not, and you just have to decide what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do. And it’s not about necessarily sacrifice. It’s just about prioritizing.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Also what I’m hearing is what you’re going to care about, what you’re going to let get to you. Because people are really judgy. They always have been. They always will be. [LAUGHTER]

JAMIE LADGE: And some of those people are the people that are closest to you. Right?

DANNA GREENBERG: I also think, Amy, your point about what are your priorities at the moment is a really important one to figure out. Right? Because those priorities are going to shift and change, and that’s part of the story. Right? And so you make those decisions. This is right for me at this moment. And that can be really easing up for a working mother, versus, this is a choice I’m making, and I’m locked into it, versus I’m doing this now. It’s right for me today. In six months, in a year, in five years, it’s probably going to look really different, and that’s good.

AMY GALLO: Right. Well, and I think, when you look at kids, how much they change from infancy to teenage years, or even young adulthood, you have to think about how as a mom you’re going through the same evolution, right, and as many changes. I remember thinking, you know, I want to work part time while my kid is really young. And then I realized, I hated fighting about nap, right, when she was giving up her nap, one of her naps. I was like, no, this is a great time for me to work, and someone who’s a professional to handle this nap transition. And then six months later, it’s different. I had the luxury of making different choices about how to handle my work life and go full time or part time, because I was working for myself. But you know, I think we think there’s going to be a plan for the 18 years, and really, you know, really the plan’s six months at most. Right?

NICOLE TORRES: But how do you deal with, how do you make yourself OK knowing that priorities could shift at a given moment, a given day, when if you’re working in an organization that is not very flexible, and is not going to accommodate your shifting priorities?

DANNA GREENBERG: There are a couple of different ways to think about that. It’s not an easy situation. Right? Organizations don’t make it easy for us and our shifting priorities, and also, as you point out, as your children change. And so thinking about some of that in advance can be really helpful. Preparing for yourself about, OK, my children are going to be going to elementary school or middle school, and what might that look like, or who in my organization can I talk to who’s parenting older children? And what advice can I get from them about how do I manage this next stage? What am I going to do differently? Keeping your professional network up is absolutely critical, because at the end of the day, if you can’t make it work in your current organization, having a strong professional network means that maybe you can find choices outside in different organizations.

NICOLE TORRES: So, both of you write in your book, you talk about the importance of new mothers developing what you call “childcare bench strength.” What is that?

DANNA GREENBERG: So, bench strength is a term that we adopt from athletics. Right? When you think about a really strong athletic team, you’re thinking about not just having that first-string player, but having a really strong second-string player, and even a third-string player, because at some point the first-string player, something’s going to happen. And they’re going to be out of commission, and you have to rely on the second string. When we talk to women about childcare, we find they spend a lot of time thinking about what I call that first-string childcare: what’s the best childcare I can find that works for my child, works for my job, and works for our financial situation? And that’s great. But that childcare’s going to break down. It’s going to break down because your child’s going to get sick. It’s going to break down because you’re going to have an emergency meeting first thing in the morning, and your partner’s going to be traveling. It’s going to break down because the childcare provider is going to be sick. It’s going to break down, in my case, because we had to fire our childcare provider suddenly. Right? It breaks down. And so those are the moment that women often panic. They’re also the moments where women who always thought they were going to work may decide not to work. If you’ve got bench strength, it helps ease the anxiety about that. So figuring out in advance when my childcare situation breaks down, what am I going to do? What’s it going to look like? And we’ve seen women do a lot of very different creative things on this. It can be anything from obviously family members. It could be an elderly, if you don’t have family members in the area, an elderly neighbor that you’re close with. It can be another stay-at-home mom, somebody who’s staying home and can take your child and help you in that particular way. It can be formal backup care programs. But figuring out that in advance, having those phone numbers, being ready to dial so when the childcare situation breaks down, you’re ready to figure out what comes next. Because it’s going to break down. It’s just a part of being a working mom is, you’re going to have days where the childcare isn’t there.

AMY GALLO: One of the stories I really liked in the book was a woman named Martha, who was a single working mom, and befriended another working mom, and they essentially ended up co-parenting. Right? Even though they didn’t coexist in the same household. Can you talk about how common that is?

JAMIE LADGE: I actually don’t think it’s common enough, because I think women are so worried about asking for help. I do it. I don’t do it as much as I probably want to do it, because you do feel like you’re leaning on someone too much. But it’s really challenging. I mean, there’s a lot of people who don’t have families around them. You know? I mean, not everybody has the luxury of having grandparents and whoever around to fill that bench strength. And so I would just, this might be digressing from your question, but just to add to what Danna was saying, it’s not only the woman or the mother building up that bench strength, but also making sure, you know, in terms of people, physical people that are helping you out, but also making sure that it’s OK. Like the example you gave of the professor or the faculty member who brought their child to a meeting. But making sure you’re surrounded, you’re surrounding yourself with people at work that are perfectly fine with you doing kooky things like that, or even, I’m just reflecting back on when I was in my PhD program. I started that program, and I was with three single men. And I just stated right up front, we’re having any group meetings at my house. I mean, fortunately, I lived right near the university, but every group meeting is going to be at my house. And they were perfectly fine with that. They loved that. And my baby was there, and they would play with the baby, and so there’s a different form of bench strength that also goes beyond the childcare aspect as well.

AMY GALLO: I want to be clear that we are strongly advocating for more babies at meetings. [LAUGHTER]

AMY BERNSTEIN: All for it.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, the challenge of finding supportive childcare doesn’t stop when the kids go off to school. So, talk to us a little bit about the stress of, you know, the after school pick up, on women’s careers, and how people deal with it. What are some creative strategies?

DANNA GREENBERG: So, when we’re talking about after school stress, one of the things, there’s been a lot of research actually done on this topic, we know that when working parents feel a lot of stress about, is their child well taken care of after school, or in this out of school time, it affects their engagement at work, it affects their work stress. It actually affects the quality of work they’re doing, as well as their overall psychological and emotional well-being. So, the impact of after school stress isn’t just on us at home. It’s on us in our workplaces as well. So, one of the things that really happens for working mothers in that first transition is when you’re child leaves whatever traditional childcare arrangement you’ve figured out for yourself, they transition to elementary school, typically a kindergarten in the United States. And all of a sudden, you’re shocked. It’s a shock to a family system because kindergarten, or any elementary school situation is usually about six to seven hours. It runs 10 months of the year. And about 30 of those days are not covered. Right? So you’ve got huge gaps in the care situation you have, and while we’ve done some work to improve quality childcare in the early years, we’ve done very little to improve quality childcare in those later years. So again, thinking about that in advance can be really helpful for working families. One of the things that we talk to families about a lot is this idea of, how do you think about the community you’re going into, and to what extent is this going to be a community that has systems in place that are going to help you as a working mother? So people make decisions about doing into a community based hunt, typically. What kind of house, how big a house I can afford? What’s the quality of the school system? But they don’t think at all about, is there before-school care in the system? Is there after-school care? Is there an after school care program that my kid’s going to have to get bussed to? How does bussing work in the system? Will they pick my child up at the end of my road? Or will they pick them up at the end of my driveway? That creates a really different context. Are there other working parents? You can use that from census data and available data. Does the recreation system, is it set up in a way that there’s summer camps, and there are vacation camps? And are those things that are actually used by parents in the community? Doing some research on that can help you figure out, how do I get into a community that’s going to be able to be a place where I can be authentic about who I am and have the support I need and be more comfortable asking for those supports, versus feeling like I’ve got to hide a little bit, either side of my life.

JAMIE LADGE: And emotionally, as well, I think finding communities where there are other working parents, working mothers, around, because I’ve used after-school programs, and even, well, in a community where there’s probably predominantly fewer working mothers, but you feel guilty about being the last one to pick up your kid in an after school program that goes until six. You feel guilty about dropping your kid off at seven in the morning when you don’t see any other parents or kids around. There’s this emotional struggle having to feel like you have to downplay your work, or you have to sacrifice your work to be there. And so the stress is not just the financial stress, but there’s also the psychological stress associated with feeling the guilt about, you know, utilizing these programs that are the very programs that are supposed to alleviate the stress to begin with. So I think the community thing is an interesting one, not just in terms of what resources are available, but also what people, you know, you surround yourself with in those resources.

DANNA GREENBERG: And I also tell people to really try to find partners in your organization, other working families that you can switch off or trade off with. So I really advise our junior faculty about this. They struggle with those vacation weeks, because we’re teaching. We’re in the classroom. And so, find another faculty member who’s got kids, maybe around your same age, maybe not, and maybe you can trade off one day for one day, that kind of a model. Or you can trade off pickups. And so that community support can be at your home community, but it can also be in your work community too.

AMY GALLO: Our neighbors, we have a text chain that, whenever school vacation’s coming up, or snow days, it’s like, who’s going to be home? Where can the kids go? It’s OK if they watch TV all day, but will anyone be home? And it’s great, because it’s, you know, I can still go to work if I need to.

DANNA GREENBERG: Right, and it sounds like you live in a neighborhood where you have a lot of dual-career working parents. Right? So being in a neighborhood where you know sending that text out, or also knowing on the other hand that you’re sending the text out, and there might be a stay-at-home mom who’s happy to help and pitch in, because there are going to be other ways you’re going to be able to support her, too. So part of the network and community is also building relationships between those who are currently working and those who aren’t.

AMY GALLO: There’s a stay-at-home mom at my daughter’s school who is like the uber stay-at-home mom. And I know if I send her a text and say, I can’t get to pickup, can you pick up my daughter, she will text back within 30 seconds. She’ll list the snacks she has packed. Are there any food allergies? I mean, it’s insane, and so comforting, because you know she has your back. And there’s no judgment about it at all. She’s great. She’s amazing.

DANNA GREENBERG: I want to move to your neighborhood. [LAUGHTER]

AMY GALLO: So Jamie, your twins are 12. My daughter is also 12. So, I’m particularly interested in what you have to say about how work changes for women when they’re mothering pre-teens or teens. I understand from your research that workplaces sort of forget that women have caregiving responsibilities at this age. How do women advocate to still get the support they need when they’re mothering older children?

JAMIE LADGE: I think that’s a great question. And one I think about all the time. I hate saying this. But I know it’s true. You know, little children, little problems, big children, huge problems. And I think people forget that. But I think one thing is figure out what your best approach is for how you deal with your work and family challenges. There’s research that shows that people often either make a choice between whether they segment their work and family or integrate their work and family. I think as I know I’ve gotten older, and accumulated more work and family knowledge, I’ve become more of an integrator, and I’m not afraid to show people that I —

AMY BERNSTEIN: So what does integrating look like?

JAMIE LADGE: So in other words, when I was starting out having kids, I didn’t have pictures of them on my desk. I didn’t talk about them at work. And I feel like I am confident enough in my ability as I’ve gotten older through the years, and as my children have gotten older, I’m less worried about any stigma that I may face as a working parent, because I’ve already proven myself, or at least I feel as though I’ve proven myself to others. A segmenter would not have pictures on there, and an integrator would bring their child into work and not have any qualms about it. And I try to signal that preference to people. And hopefully I’m a model to others that will do the same, because I think that there’s a real positive aspect of being able to show and highlight to people that work and family are important.

NICOLE TORRES: Is it harder to talk about parenting challenges older children than younger children?

DANNA GREENBERG: Absolutely. The conversation about I’m leaving early because they’re little or sick, there’s an assumption that older children are very self-sufficient in our society, good or bad. Even in high school, they’re not yet really self-sufficient. And so there can be needs to be present there that just aren’t articulated. And they’re not comfortable being incredibly transparent about what are those needs. The other thing that checks is, how interested are you in filling those needs? I don’t love big children. [LAUGHTER] Again, maybe my children listening to this, I’m not as good in the teenage years. It’s not my strength. Right? I’m lucky. I have a partner who’s really good in the teenage years. And so one of the things that we’ve actually flopped a little bit. I’m much more active and engaged at work, and he is much more the call, the go-to when they have those particular problems. And in a certain way, I think it’s easy for him to respond, because he didn’t respond when they were little. Right? So it’s new, and it’s different for him. So, it is really hard in organizations to say and advocate. I think it’s also hard for women if they worked full time their whole careers, and all of a sudden they’re saying, you know what, my kids are teenagers, they’re in high school, and I want to be a little more present. How do I advocate for myself now when I never advocated for that before?

JAMIE LADGE: But I do think it’s easier to advocate when they children are older, because there’s less fear that there’s going to be some kind of bias involved. I think one of the real challenges in what we’ve seen in our research for pregnant women or new mothers is that if I ask for something, if I advocate for something, that’s going to set the tone for my whole now life as a working mother in this profession, or whatever. And like I said before, if you have the confidence in yourself, and you know you’ve proved your value, then advocating things when your children are a little bit older I think becomes slightly easier to a large extent. But I think the challenge, what Danna’s pointing out, is the challenge of having older children doesn’t necessarily get easier.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So Danna, your kids are, you know, as you’ve said, a little older than Jamie’s. One’s in college. Two others are 16 and 18. You’re entering a new family stage. What transitions are happening to you professionally? What feels positive to you about this period?

DANNA GREENBERG: So, all of a sudden for me, there’s this energy to engage in my research and my writing and leadership in the college in a way that I just didn’t have before. And so it’s a really exciting phase. There’s also a lot of positive feedback, that starts to come from your young adult children that you don’t get from a toddler or an elementary schooler. Right? When you’re dealing with little children, there often can be more angst and tension and things that they say that make you realize and think, oh my gosh, they’re upset I work, or why do you work, Mommy, or those kinds of questions that cause you angst. When they’re older, they’re excited about your working. And Kathleen McGinn’s done some great research on this, looking at how working mothers impact both their daughters’ and their sons’ careers. And see it in my household all the time. My daughter’s studying chemistry and women’s health, and she’s done research and done research projects, and she calls me for help. My sophomore came home one day from his honors English class with 20-some odd kids in it, six boys, and the six boys got on a conversation that all six of them noticed they had working mothers in a community where there are not a lot of working mothers. And so they start to see ways in which your life has impacted them positively. And that has really exciting repercussions for a working mom.

AMY GALLO: I can imagine that being really rewarding.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, you know, as your kids are getting older, and more independent, and they’re going off to college, you get, you know, there’s a lot more coming your way. You’ve got more bandwidth. You have more opportunities. You have more experience. How do you figure out what to do with your time? How do you sort of sort through all of the options?

DANNA GREENBERG: I think it comes back to the same thing you do at early stages, which is, you have to hear your own voice. The options that come your way are exciting. They’re flattering in a lot of ways. And it’s very easy to jump in and say, yes. Yes, I’ll do that. Yes, I’ll do that. And we hear a lot from women at this stage that all of a sudden, instead of being overwhelmed with home responsibilities, they’re overwhelmed with work responsibilities. They’re overwhelmed by board responsibilities. They’re overwhelmed by community engagement responsibilities. So, taking some moments to think about, again, I don’t have to do everything at the same time. What’s my priority? Where do I want to engage? What’s going to be rewarding and fulfilling in this moment? And where am I going to say no? Because just like in your early careers, you’ve got to say no to some things. And so making those decisions based upon what I want, not what everybody else is expecting or asking of me, is really important to do.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And so, we hope by this point in your life, with all of these other balls you’ve had in the air, you’ve figured out which ones you really want to catch, right? Is that the idea?

DANNA GREENBERG: Or, which ones you want to catch now. Something — a ball that wasn’t important to you five or 10 years ago may all of a sudden be really important to you, and you’re going to really want to run with that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Mhm.

AMY GALLO: I loved the line in the book about having a proud, engaged mother be more important than a big backyard. Why do you think women lose sight of the positive sight of the positive impact their working has on their children?

DANNA GREENBERG: I think they lose sight for a couple of reasons, the first of which is the rhetoric we talked about, that we’re all told. I think the other reason you lose sight of the positive is that it is hard. The day-to-day responsibilities of loving your job, wanting to be successful in your career, in your work, wanting to be there and be present for your family and be an active and engaged parent and partner, if you have a partner — it’s not easy day to day. And I think like anything else, we lose sight of the big picture; we lose sight of the joy in those really small moments that happen, and we lament what we didn’t do. And so giving up a little of that rhetoric, giving yourself space, and looking for the joy in the day. What is that joyful moment? It might be just the cereal bowl and what happened over that conversation. Or it might be one thing that you do during the day that has an impact on a colleague or a client. But focusing on the joy changes the story you’re telling yourself. And that’s what we need to help women do, change the story we’re telling ourselves.

JAMIE LADGE: And we need more positive stories. We need women to feel good about — we need ourselves to feel good about — the choices we make, as opposed to, like Danna said, lamenting over decisions. We shouldn’t look back. We shouldn’t always feel we have to look back and say, I wish I had done that. We need to own and feel confident about the choices we make. And if they don’t work out the way we intended them to, OK, they didn’t work out, but at least we know that we can move forward from that, and maybe the next choice will work out. And just because so-and-so down the street did this or my colleague in the office did that, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me. It’s good that I have that model. It’s good that I have that guide to follow, but I’m going to chart my own path.

NICOLE TORRES: Jamie, Danna, thank you both so much for joining us and talking to us today.

JAMIE LADGE: Thank you for having us.

DANNA GREENBERG: Thank you.

NICOLE TORRES: So do you, Amy G, feel more optimistic about this? I mean, you’re kind of entering this new phase of working motherhood. Harper is 12. You know, she’s an older child. [LAUGHTER] How are you feeling after the conversation?

AMY GALLO: I do feel more optimistic. Reading the book, I felt there was a lot that resonated with me that I thought, oh, I hadn’t quite those about it that way. Because I think there is this sense that it’s motherhood and working are at odds, and that it’s more about compromise on both sides so you can make it work. And I like that they sort of talked about them actually feed one another in a positive way. And I’ve definitely seen that in my own life. And the transition I made from Harper being sort of a young child to being this tween, that was a very optimistic transition for me, because she was more independent, and she was observing me working in a way that she hadn’t before, because she was completely self-centered, as kids are.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I’m curious, though — you just said that being a mother and working, that the two sides of you fed each other. How — what was that? How did they feel each other?

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, I think the way that Danna and Jamie talked about it was that, and this is what felt true to me, is that I’m better, I’m more efficient with my time, because I have greater demands on my time than I ever have before. I use work, particularly research we find, or tactics I use, time management, I use those at home. So, I think I’m better organized at home because of it. And I think because of having a kid, I’m much more empathetic with other people. You know, having a kid, trust me, you get frustrated and mad, but you realize it’s not their fault. And I think I treat people like that at work more often. I see them all as like the child whose needs aren’t being met, rather than the adult who’s being a jerk to me in this meeting. I’m sort of more emotionally grounded than I was before I had Harper.

[MUSIC]

NICOLE TORRES: Like Danna says, working motherhood isn’t just return-to-work; it’s a long-distance run. But returning to work is the start.

HANNAH: I’d decided to take four months off. This is my third child, but it’s my first time going back to work full time because my other two children, I was self-employed, and I worked from home part time.

NICOLE TORRES: That’s Hannah, a listener who’s been in touch with us over email. Hannah first wrote us after hearing our episode “Managing Parental Leave (Yours or Someone Else’s).” She was on leave at the time, after having her daughter Greta.

HANNAH: As the three-month mark was approaching, I was feeling so unprepared, and I wasn’t ready to leave Greta, and I just had so much guilt about being away from her for so many hours during the day.

NICOLE TORRES: Hannah said the stories our colleague Erica Truxler shared in that episode helped her feel like she could manage the challenges of returning to the office full time after leave. A few months later, Hannah offered to tell us how it’s been going for her. And we thought it would be great to get Hannah and Erica on the phone together. And it really was.

ERICA TRUXLER: Well, Hannah, I just wanted to start by saying thank you so much for emailing us after our episode from last season. You know, it was very vulnerable putting myself out there and how difficult I had a time getting back into work, and hearing that you found comfort in my story really, honestly, helped me, too. So, we were helping each other [LAUGHTER] from across the country.

HANNAH: Yeah.

ERICA TRUXLER: So, I just wanted to know how, how things are going and — I don’t know if you could go maybe just into a little bit more detail about maybe even just your first month back at work and how that went and, really, yes, just an update on how things are going on your end.

HANNAH: Yeah. Yeah. So, I had a positive outlook, but I think — I mean, I tend to be a little bit type A, so I think I took it, like, to the extreme a little bit. And I was just — I went back to work with this attitude of, like, I’m going to do it all. I’m going to fit it all, everything I want to do in one day into a day. And I’m going to do all this self-care. I had this — you know, I had this crazy schedule of, like, I’m going to wake up at 5 a.m. every morning and meditate and work out and do all these things before the kids wake up. And I was kind of doing it on some weeks, but I had such a frantic energy, going from one thing to the next. And even though I was trying to practice all this self-care, it was not really self-care because —

ERICA TRUXLER: Yes, yes.

HANNAH: It was like a stressful thing to complete it. So then it was like this crazy rollercoaster. Within two weeks of getting back to work, our whole family got hit with the stomach flu. Oh, then I got strep throat.

ERICA TRUXLER: Oh, my goodness, yes, I had exactly the same experience. [LAUGHTER] I was going to mention, this was my first winter, daycare, germ-filled winter, with my 1-year-old now, Claire. And truly it was almost, like, back to back. We also had — I think it was two or three stomach flus, the flu, also pink eye, hand, foot, and mouth, double ear infection at the same time as hand, foot, and mouth. So, anyways, all of this is to say, I hear you, and I feel that it’s one of those things where, you know, you kind of go in and you’re like, I can do this. I set myself up for success. I even carve in some me time before babies wake up. And then the reality hits.

HANNAH: Yeah, and it’s hard to figure out, like, what is, like, the best perspective to have. And I know that you gave me the advice to just be gentle with yourself. And I feel like that’s a really good thing to focus on, but sometimes, like, I know for me, I had to go through that curve of having all these expectations and having them backfire and being like, oh, OK, this is what it means to be gentle with myself, you know?

ERICA TRUXLER: Yes, yes. And Amy is — Amy Gallo is careful to say it’s not lowering our expectations; it’s setting expectations for the moment that we’re in in our lives.

HANNAH: Yeah. I work with a coach through my work that was actually a leadership coach to start, but she morphed into my maternity leave coach [LAUGHTER].

ERICA TRUXLER: Yes.

HANNAH: So, and we were working on all these things, like, OK, don’t expect to do everything in one day. Let’s stretch out the time. Maybe it’s you’re trying to complete those things in one week or two weeks. The other thing I did, which was crazy, but I stopped drinking coffee. And I feel like that really helped my frantic energy. And even though I was sleep-deprived and tired, I think it was better to be in that state than it was to have that kind of buzz going on all the time.

ERICA TRUXLER: Anxious energy, yeah.

HANNAH: Yeah. So, like I said, I’ve always been kind of a go-getter, exerciser every day — that type of thing. And I just was like, you know what, I’m not even going to exercise. I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to go to work and be with my family. And I feel like taking it way down I finally accepted it, and I feel like that was a huge —

ERICA TRUXLER: It’s huge!

HANNAH: Yeah, it made such a difference.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yeah, and I do feel that there is positivity that we often miss in the rush and the bustle of going back and forth and rushing to daycare and doing deadlines and work.

HANNAH: Mhm.

ERICA TRUXLER: And I was just wondering if there are any moments that you can think over the past few months where you really did feel happy at work, and you came home and you felt happy at home, and you realized, wait a second, I wouldn’t have this feeling if I weren’t doing both?

HANNAH: Yeah. Well, for one, I mean, compared to my first two children, I think — and this is of course something that’s so different and is such a personal thing for everybody, but I really like working outside of the home. It’s really nice having that — I mean, it is like a little bit of a break. You know, when you’re a parent and you’re working so hard, and it’s such a demanding role, sometimes it’s nice to step out of that. And I think if you’re not working outside of the home, it’s a little harder to orchestrate that as frequently or have it be as effective as working outside of the home. So, I think that that was something that was really a positive thing this go-around. And the other thing about that, I was so worried about all the hours I was going to be away from Greta, and in the end, that was probably one of the least challenging things for me.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yes.

HANNAH: I mean, of course I missed her at work, but I don’t feel like I have a deficit of time with her.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yes, you know what’s funny is, I’ve noticed, on Sundays, when I’m with Claire all day, and I’m there starting at 5:30 in the morning, by, like, 9:45, I’m, I’m starting to get very tired, and I start to check my phone. And I start to go on Instagram or something while she’s sitting next to me.

HANNAH: Right.

ERICA TRUXLER: And I’ve had this realization that when I pick her up from daycare, it’s such a happy moment for me. Like, literally, yesterday, I was in her — they have a little playground — and I was talking to one of her teachers, and I didn’t see her right away. And then all of a sudden, I hear, mama, mama, and she’s running towards me, and it was just, like, the happiest moment, honestly.

HANNAH: Yeah.

ERICA TRUXLER: And then we come home, and we have about two hours, so it’s not much, but those two hours I make a point to not have my phone in front of me, and we are playing, and I value that time so much. And when I’ve had a good day at work, I often think, I’ve been able to accomplish, you know, edit that article, and I came home and had a great evening with Claire, and I feel very positive about it. And often those positive moments do get overrun by, you know, the illnesses. And so I’ve been trying to kind of note the positive moments more when I can as well.

HANNAH: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s something that for me, when I slowed everything down, it really helped me to have more of that kind of attitude and really recognize what I was accomplishing.

ERICA TRUXLER: Right! Thank you so much, Hannah. This has been such a great conversation.

AMY GALLO: And one more note: we’ve heard from a lot of our listeners about the discussion guides. I was actually at an event in California a couple weeks ago, and someone stopped me at the sink in a bathroom to tell me that she uses the discussion guides with her women’s group at her organization.

AMY BERNSTEIN: That is fantastic. We also got this email saying, and I’m going to quote here: “The guides are having an impact on how we talk, act, and lean on each other in the office.”

AMY GALLO: If you want access to the guides, you can find them on our website, at HBR.org/podcasts, on the Women at Work page.